eddyfate

"In observation of this day of kittening of the Royal Handmaiden, there will be celebrations and feasting."

(Dante helped me with that bit, since he's good at words, and he's older than me.)

There should be... stuff. And petting. And stuff. And play. And treats. And stuff. I think.

Sincerely,

Puckington von Wigglesticks III, Esq.

Edit: Oh wait, Greebo wanted to say something.

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What? What are you doing, you strange dog? Fuck off and die.

Greebo

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Sorry. Guess he's being grumpy today....

P.v.W.3.Esq.

Yes, I do do things aside from my writing.

Work on Friday sucked, as the Palm software I had to help teach at student orientation crashed 50-75% of the student's PDAs. But it as better, as that night was supposed to be "get together and work on various LARP games" with garchangel and mrogre that ended up being "let's cook food and play poker and hang out" and included me, greebotrill and banzaigrrl as well. I got to see banzaigrrl's new toy (shiny Apple laptop), talk about all sorts of amusing things, and get vaguely tipsy and lose lots of fictional money to mrogre.

Saturday was the impromptu family celebration of greebotrill's birthday (which is today in actuality), which involved sushi and Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer. Both the movie and the sushi were better than expected.

Sunday was the impromptu (sensing a trend?) "Father's Day" celebration. It seems that, somewhat as a joke, garchangel got greebotrill a present on Mother's Day from Puck, our pug dog. So, greebotrill returned the favor. garchangel got these neat battling Megatron and Optimus Prime action figure guys, and I got a copy of Transformers Risk that I desperately want to play.

Over the weekend I found that I gained about ten pounds in the past week or so, and I had been steadily slacking off on my diet and exercise (for a lot of reasons that don't excuse that it happened). I resolved to start dedicating myself back to my weight loss today.

Today work was a lot of catching up on the work I couldn't do on Thursday or Friday from said Palm software crashing, which involved calling a lot of restaurants and trying to schedule a ton of meetings. Wednesday I plan to have dinner with friends, and Thursday I'm going to get my hair cut. It's not been an insanely busy week or so, or maybe I'm just acclimating to the pace better.

Hey... we have hardwood floors and a pug dog....

I've been meaning to post this, but I haven't had access to a printer, and the pic isn't online.

During the power outage, greebotrill had to put the animals at the Humane Society to cool while we stayed at a hotel. The Post-Dispatch had a reporter follow our animals from house to crate, particularly Puck.

And he made the paper.

(Scan provided by kappsgurl, the woman we bought Puck from a year ago.)

In taking a break from homework, I decided to cross something else off of my To Do list and post up pictures of Puck that I promised months ago.

I present to you Lord Puckington von Wigglesticks III, Esq.

Puck hiding behind pillows
Puck helping me read the Deryni RPG
Puck just being so damned cute

Thursday: Exalted. Some homework.

Friday: Get other class syllabus, and realize I need to read something like 150 pages over the weekend. "Chapter social" that ends up being almost exactly the same group as the Exalted game. Some fun Magic games occur, but very little homework.

Saturday: Finish one book. Take Puck and Trillian to vet, end up staying for two hours. Bring them home, and try to read some, but end up having to make sure Trillian eats (as she hasn't been for a few days). Go to Requiem early and try to study some more, but I end up sucked into meetings pretty much when I get there. End up staying out later than I wanted to chatting with cool out-of-town visitors, and end up giving local-ish member a place to crash.

Sunday: Start to work on the 120 pages I need to read today. Thinking I have all day, I take a break to chat with person who crashed and run errands. Find out that a D&D game was scheduled that I was never told about, so I now have to skip the game to make sure I get all my reading done.

Monday: Work, dinner, class, bed.

Tuesday: Get started on the story that's due in February that suggests 40 hours of work be put into it (ha!).

Puck had been a little rowdy, a little hyper, but otherwise pretty good the past week or so. Today, however, I got a report from greebotrill that he has made up for lost time. When greebotrill got home from class, she found the newspaper pulled out and pee and poop on the carpet and paper. Then he goes into our bedroom (where he's not allowed) and chews on garchangel's clothing, and then tries to hide under the bed. Then he overcame his fear of coming into the bathroom just in time to chew up a roll of toilet paper while greebotrill was on the treadmill. He's being a butthead today.

Not much to update on.

Media Blitz: Spent most of the weekend watching television, since Puck wouldn't keep still long enough for me to get any serious work done or leave me alone enough to read. I watched a lot of Doctor Who (pretty much all of Season 20), the first season of Drawn Together, the first part of the new Battlestar: Galactica pilot, and the last disc of the first season of Deadwood.

Being Social: I spent Friday night watching the last two episodes of the 2005 season of Doctor Who with banzaigrrl ("Fantastic!"), and spending some time chatting to the few people I knew at writer_lynn's party on Saturday. I ended up staying up until 2am on Saturday, and having passed my "wall of sleep" couldn't actually get tired enough to sleep until 3:30am or so.

Muse: My muse is being fickle again -- I'll burn brightly with an idea for a day or two, jot down a ton of notes to type up and expand on, and by the time I get around to it another idea has grabbed my fancy and I just plunk the notes in and move on. I was enjoying the free-wheeling creativity of the whole exercise, but now I'm feeling very frustrated with the whole thing. I consolidated my thoughts on various projects in my moleskine, and perhaps tonight I'll update my project files with those notes and start to think about what projects I'm going to focus on come September 1. I'm considering having one RPG project and one fiction project to focus on, with various other projects remaining open in order to fill my 200 word quota on days when I'm just stuck on the two main projects.

Puck: Drove me crazy all weekend. Since I was home alone, I was the only person who could pay attention to him, and he was very insistant about having attention. A few times he was polite and nice, but most of the time was me yelling at him and him ignoring me. It makes me wonder how patient I'm going to be with children if a puppy has the capacity to drive me crazy.

Health: Haven't had dizzy spells in a while, but I also haven't been inclined to exercise or keep to my diet recently. Not sure why I've been feeling that way, but eating a decent amount of crap this weekend made me feel disgusting, so hopefully that will focus me back on it.

Air Conditioning: Had a good amount of sleep, but still feel tired. Probably because the air conditioning broke down (again!) on the upstairs floor. Having someone come look at that today.

Let's see.

Last night I did some minor organizing of my office again before I had to grab dinner from Burger King and attend an out-of-character Requiem meeting. We discussed the planning for the October game (well, the three of us who actually showed up remotely on time), and sorted out some miscommunications in regards to the notes from the last meeting. From an OOC perspective, I like how the politics in this game are shaping up -- there's a LOT more vectors than in Masquerade, a lot more going on, and lots of hooks to hang IC goals on. I'm going to talk to the VST about putting another piece into play that will make things even more interesting. I was starting to miss being a LARP ST, and then I was reminded of the relentless personal drama involved in storytelling in the Cam, and got over it.

I haven't updated on Puck in a while. The only thing he's really been destructive on is the rug in the kitchen where we keep him at night, so that's not too surprising. He also tore up garchangel's slippers, so we do have to be careful about leaving stuff on the floor. He's been missing the dog box once in a while, so we're having to discipline him on that. The cats still aren't too fond of him, but they'll co-exist in the same room happily, hissing at him when he gets excited and very close to them. He met a good portion of the Tribe at SlackCon, and was happily playing with all of them, so he's certainly not going to be a problem in that regard. Basically, we just need to work on his more excessive behaviors, which usually isn't a problem with two or three people in the house most of the time. Keeping an eye on him for four days on my own might be a bit tricky, though -- we'll see how it goes.

Took some more notes for my long-term, non-salable RPG design (okay, let's call a spade a spade -- my final attempt at a Transformers RPG), and I think I'm going to take a stab at organizing my thoughts on this tonight. I'm hoping to hear from my ear doctor today or tomorrow about when the surgery will be scheduled, too.

Health: Worked out again last night, and broke a sweat. I plan to try again today with greebotrill's help. Dizzy spells seem to be pretty much gone.

Writing: Organized my projects a bit on my computer, and finally wrote up most of the notes for my D&D rogue campaign idea. Discovered my old notes from my last D&D game, Darkgate, from 2001 (which folded after one session). Might be worth combining the two if I ever do it, but it will take a LOT longer than a few sessions to uncover everything in Darkgate.

Requiem: Starting to burn out on it a bit (although not so much on the LARP itself). ICC should be fun, but I'm more looking forward to seeing my friends.

Puck: Slow acclamation with the cats -- it's not great, but it's better. He seems to be less interested in hanging out with me, though, and likes to bite me a lot (not hard, but play bites), but that might be just because he spends so much time with greebotrill.

Work: Ugh. Hateful.

My dog leads a more interesting life than I do.

So, after a few false starts, Puck did manage to master the stairs, even running up the stairs with me when I went into my office. The cats freaked out (again) for a while, but when Puck went downstairs to watch TV and nap with garchangel, the cats actually came into the same room as Puck, and Claudius even got within a few inches of Puck while he was groggy. There was some hissing and fluffing this morning, but that's mainly because Puck was in super-hyper-excited-puppy mode. So, it seems like things are getting better, but only time will tell.

I spent an hour typing up and organizing my notes for "Bete Noire," and then spent most of the rest of my night reading comics and watching "Shallow Hal." Near the end of the night I realized that I have a few projects and a couple of emails I need to work on (minor stuff, like doing the edits on my microfiction that I got from MAY), so over the next couple of days I plan to get all that off my desk -- literally, as it's creating a pile. Then I think I'm going to organize my desk a bit, update my filing, sort out my project list for when September starts, move my to-do list from a few different places into my Palm, excise projects I'm not going to do anytime soon, and generally get my shit in order, because come September 1 I won't be inclined to do it.

(Side note: I have a few ideas for projects when I return. I had originally decided to focus on either Midway City supplements or the modern crime drama game I've been kicking around, but rediscovering my Marvel 2099 comics recently is tempting me to work on Omlevex 2063, and I'm still poking around a bit with One Night Stand. This is the reason why I need to plan out my project work. :P)

Woke up tired today; that's been happing a fair bit lately. Working out and Greco-Exalted tonight.

greebotrill just called, and it seems that Puck managed to climb the stairs in the house! So now the pug has full range of the house, and the Cat/Puck conflict escalates again.

My subject lines are becoming less and less inspired. Part of the reason is that, despite my last post, there really isn't that much going on in a short-term sense. I did get a few more pages of notes on "Bete Noire" done, and I'm pleased with the basic skeleton I have. Now I'm going to expand on each plot point, and then go back and make sure the characters are the right kind of people to be at each of those plot points. Then I focus on the characters and expand each of them to make them interesting and engaging. Then I should be ready to start writing. I have no idea what length this story will be, but I'll write on it until it's done. At a rough guess I'm estimating something between a longish short story and a shortish novella -- definately not microfiction, and definately not a novel.

As I was working on characters, though, I stumbled across the "Mary Sue Litmus Test". For those who don't know, "Mary Sue" is fanfiction slang for an overly-idealized author surrogate character. While the test is self-admittedly harsh and really slanted (for example, Requiem LARP characters of any stripe will pick up a couple dozen points just by being a Requiem LARP character), it is a good indication of some pitfalls to avoid. I seem to thus far have already avoided them.

Puck seems to be settling in. He's not biting as much or jumping up as much, and he likes to sit and watch TV with us on the couch. He's still very excited and full of energy (duh, he's a puppy), but we're not noticing any serious behaviour problems. Greebo and Trillian aren't warming up to him yet, but Claudius is being more adventurous (even though he still fluffs and yowls a lot). Beyond that, last night was just relaxing, something I'm learning to enjoy.

Edit: Completely forgot about my health update. I decided to take some advice I got in my LJ and start exercising anyhow. I did ten minutes of a fast walk on the treadmill, ten crunches, and a few reps with a light hand-weight. Oddly, I didn't get dizzy at all during the exercise, but an hour or so later I did (after I had showered, changed, and sat on the couch for a while). As such, I'm going to sit down with greebotrill and work up a routine, but I'm going to try to do something every day, even if it's a few crunches or walking around the block with Puck.

This was supposed to be a short update, and completely failed on the "short" part. ( My life update )